Wednesday, November 30, 2005

1 Million Miles

Work commitments and work travel (another 11,000 miles) have kept me from updating the blog.

So some totals - Mileage earned: 1,003,625Current Flight Segments in Aeroplan account: 276Days I have been in an airplane: 56 out of the last 61.Favorite Air Canada aircraft: B767-300 Times I have seen March of the Penguins: 0 I never actually got thru it without falling asleep.

and finally..weight change: +8lbs.

I attribute it to the lack of on board fruit plates in November led to increased consumption of cookies in the Maple Leaf Lounges..and what's a cookie without a glass of Baileys????

What's next? Well I have travelled 3/4 a way around the world in the last 3.5 days and completed my bi annual simulator session in Frankfurt (Calgary Frankfurt on Air Canada :) )

I am now in Hong Kong. Within 4 hrs of moving into my apartment I had a house guest. Fellow mileage runner Sean, in the middle of 6 back to back transpacific segments, rang me up and took advantage of my fresh digs to shower and sleep the 8 short hrs between his flights to from Chicago - to Chicago. Then back to Bangkok!

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What's next?

Well I can recommend the following blog or a very good friend who is the IT Manager on the MV Constellation Celebrity Cruise ship:

30 Comments:

I just spent 2.5 days on airplanes with a 7 hr break in Singapore, then came back. I feel like I am still on a plane... need to get my land legs back. You must feel this times 1000!! 56 days on a plane... yow!

Congrats Marc. It's awesome that you made it; good luck repairing your home life now! :)

Congratulations! Saw your story highlighted on Yahoo News and thought I would pop over to read about your quest. Never flew in anything bigger than a Beaver until last year when I needed to get from NY to Seattle in a hurry. Agony to be a coach passenger after sitting next to the pilot on half a dozen fishing trips in Quebec.I can drive the distance (don't know that I would make a million miles in 61 days) but being a passenger--nope, not me.

Whoa! Don't know how you did it! We have to make a trip to Ukraine for an adoption and I am NOT looking forward to the long haul over and back. That is awesome, congrats! Too bad you can't donate those miles...(-: Have a blast on your vactions with your family! Does it ever bother you to be in the "passenger" seat instead of the "driver?"

In working toward your goal of clocking 1 Million Miles of air travel within 60 days, you have been directly responsible for the burning of a disproportionately large amount of fossil fuel for one person, and the release of a huge volume of CO2 gas – a climate-forcing gas derived from the burning of a non-renewable fuel, the overconsumption of which is pushing the world closer and closer toward a global energy crisis.

Atmosfair is an agency which offers individuals the chance to offset their carbon emissions from air travel by investing in carbon sequestration projects around the world. Based on their calculations, your impact from flying the 1 Million Miles is roughly equivalent to driving a middle class model car for 145 years, an average of 12,000 km per year.

In 1998, the EPA estimated that the average Canadian citizen was responsible for 17 Tons of CO2 gas released yearly. In only 60 days, you managed to clock 17 times that many tons of carbon.

Now as you do, I live in Vancouver, and I know that residents of the rainy coast are some of the most environmentally conscious people in Canada. I find it hard to believe that a Vancouverite like yourself would find himself responsible for such a huge sum of carbon emissions and not feel responsible to invest in a carbon sequestration program or two to help offset his direct emissions. The David Suzuki Foundation website has a long list of links to carbon offseting programs; I suggest you start there. If you would like to meet in Vancouver to talk about some of your options I would be happy to hear about your travels and to suggest ways that you can become Carbon Neutral.

Interesting Stats. I am sure it would annoy you to know that the B747 I fly is so old that we practically shovel coal into the engines. You should see the smoke trails!!I am sure I send a lot more crap into the atmosphere in one trip on that thing than for my mileage run (BTW..as far as I know the plane would have left and polluted the earth whether I was on it or not).

As for reparation, I can promise not to eat beans to limit future flatulence..I don't really like beans anyway

My holiday flying will (according to Atmosfair) contribute 1780 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere, and I plan on compensating for those emissions by investing in renewable energy programs in Ontario that offset the release of atmospheric carbon there.

re: your above comment... If you hadn't been on that plane that day, all that would change is that the burden of responsibility would have been a little bit larger for every passenger that did. You're pretty bold to suggest that there is no relationship between the demand for something and its supply. Alfred Marshall would like to have a word with you.

As for reparation, I can promise not to eat beans to limit future flatulence..I don't really like beans anyway

What an incredibly sarcastic, naive and uncalled for response. I felt that Steve had very politely raised another perspective on this venture, one that is very much needed in this day and age, and your response exemplifies the ignorance, or perhaps it's just apathy, of those in the global north.

Currently in Montreal the UN is holding a ten day climate change meeting. Thousands of people are in the street trying to get the message out that the Kyoto accord needs to be respected and that our governments should be held accountable for what we are doing to our planet. The irony of being in the streets today and seeing this blog this evening is not lost on me. What can our governments do when its citizens believe that reducing "flatulence" is a suitable approach to sustainable development. And yes, I'm being sarcastic.

I understand the necessity and desire to travel. I even applaud you on your accomplishment, but to simply dismiss the context within which it has taken place, in such a derrogatory way, is like a slap in the face to millions of people: among them, the recent hurricane victims in New Orleans, and even more profoundly, to our future generations.

What Steve proposed was not radical. It was practical. If we want to continue to believe that it is our right as "Canadian" citizens to consume more natural resources and create more waste per capita than over 90% of the peoples of the world, that's fine. But at least we could recognise that we are doing so, and perhaps give back a tiny little bit of our exorbitant wealth to the development of a more sustainable world, rather than trampsing across it, acting like arrogant kings visiting upon their subjects, not giving a damn about who and how many they kill along the way...

Wonder if Steve would like to calculate what percentage of CO2 emissions produced worldwide in Oct and Nov was produced by Marc's planes... then credit him with 1 over the average number of passengers in his plane.

I'm betting it would a decimal point with a LOT of zeroes after it.

Mileage runners are not the best way for your concerns to have impact, Steve. There are so few compared to the number of Hummer-drivers (for example). I think energy is better expended where it stands to have real impact.

Peabody wrote:I think energy is better expended where it stands to have real impact.

I couldn't have said it better! Energy (the chemical energy stored in fossil fuel) should be expended (converted into some kind of other energy – kinetic, light, sound, etc...) where it stands to have real impact. Do you think that joyriding around the world for the chance to earn a cool $63,000 (or whatever) in flight vouchers as 'profit' qualifies as real impact?

I think that if you could have stopped Marc from doing his MR back on Oct 1st, the net impact on the world would have been immeasurably small. Negligible. I am very keen on protecting the environment, and I do a lot (including riding my bike, avoid eating meat, contributing $$ to environmental groups, etc) to try and do my part. But I think focussing on Marc here is really misguided... so much more impact would be had by spending time trying to get people on bikes or pub transit, encouraging low-emission vehicles, etc.

Making a fuss to stop the tiny population of mileage runners is a good example of focussing on the wrong issues. My opinion.

The poster had referenced carbonfund.org. The statistics there are poor. For example, if you take the 747-300 (not an efficient airplane), a range of 7700 miles takes 52,000 gal of fuel. 500 people are onboard. This gives about 74 miles/gal/person (not including crew), which ends up with a value of about .27 lbs of carbon/mile, instead of the .63 lbs assumed by the web site. However, if you assume that the flight was going there anyway, you might take your weight as a percentage of the weight of the flight. The max takeoff weight is 833,000 lbs, so a 200 lb individual is about 1/4000th of the carbon of the flight (instead of 1/500th) leading to a calculation of 0.03 lbs / mile.

You can fudge for different airplanes, and for non-full flights, and for shorter flights, but you'd probably have to be a flight engineer to get an answer that's believable.

I believe we humans should be as efficient as possible, but I hate bad statistics.